Chapter Text
“That was the last one,” huffed Nat as he landed hands and feet first on the roof of a building across from the crumbling inferno, the impact rattling through his bones as he crouched and steadied himself, smoke billowing upward in thick, suffocating plumes that spread like ink across the night sky and drowned the stars. “Tell the firefighters they can finally start drowning all that shit.”
“On it,” hummed Shauna through the comms, her voice clipped, efficient, already busy with something else, before the line went dead with a soft click.
Nat blew out a sharp breath and, with a half-smirk tugging at his lips, tried to roll the tension out of his shoulders, lowering himself onto the ledge of the roof where the metal was still warm from the waves of heat below. “So, about that massage,” he added with a snicker, swinging his legs out into the open air, the city sprawling beneath him, his tone light and teasing as he flexed his wrist and felt the faint sting of overuse run up his arm.
But silence answered him. No dry remark. No groaned insult. Nothing.
He chuckled anyway, shaking his head as though she were just playing one of her games. “Lot?” he tried again, grin widening almost stubbornly, the kind of grin that never quite admitted to worry. “Hey, don’t think ignoring me is gonna work. I can be very insistent.”
Still nothing. Not even the buzz of static that usually filled the pauses. Just silence.
And then the grin cracked. It faltered, his chest tightening in that way it always did when instinct caught up to him faster than thought, when something in the air shifted almost imperceptibly but enough for his body to register danger before his mind could.
“Lottie?” he breathed, the word smaller this time, almost a whisper, though it barely carried past his own mask.
The only answer was the roar of the fire and the dull collapse of concrete on steel.
He shot to his feet in an instant, every trace of levity gone, his gaze snapping toward the jagged silhouette of the tower, the flames licking higher as if trying to consume every floor before he could reach it. His pulse kicked, his body already moving before he had fully registered the thought, because if there was one thing that terrified him more than the fire itself, it was the silence where her voice should have been.
Without hesitation he leapt, diving off the roof, air rushing past him as he propelled himself forward with sharp, practiced flicks of his wrists, each webline snapping taut with a sting against his palms. The world blurred into streaks of light and smoke as he pushed harder, faster, driven not by strategy or by training but by the sick weight of panic curling in his gut.
“Hey—Lottie’s not answering me,” he barked into the comms as Shauna’s line crackled back to life. “I think her comms are down. Can you locate her?” His voice was taut now, stripped of bravado, raw with urgency, each word punched out between breaths as the burning tower loomed closer with every swing.
Even though the flames were finally beginning to die down under the relentless effort of the firefighters, the building itself still felt alive in its death throes, the gutted frame crackling and moaning as if protesting its collapse, smoke curling in long, suffocating tendrils out of every window that still stood jagged and broken, each shattered pane spilling black breath into the air and reminding him with every gust that whatever was inside was far from safe.
The Spider hurled himself back into what felt like the cold corpse of the once-living structure, moving fast but with his senses spread wide, trying desperately to locate where the other Spider could have disappeared. He had thought it would be simple—surely some flash of pink clinging to cracked concrete, some telltale movement against the endless monotone of scorched gray walls—but as the seconds dragged themselves out into long, heavy moments, each floor yielding only more silence and more ruin, he realized there was no sign of her at all, not even the faintest echo of her grating voice bouncing through the comms, no movement in the corners of his vision, no trace of the irritatingly bright presence that had always seemed impossible to lose.
Then came the static, sharp and uneven in his ear, before Shauna’s voice broke through: “Uh— they’re telling me the suit is somewhere under the tower?”
“What the fuck,” Nat muttered under his breath, the words leaving his mouth like a reflex as he vaulted from the fractured lip of the floor, letting gravity take him and slamming down toward the ground level with a speed that rattled his bones.
Shauna’s voice cut back in, tighter now, threaded with unease: “Can’t seem to get through to her either, maybe— maybe there was an underground parking lot or some kind of sublevel she dropped into?”
“Alright,” Nat grunted, already moving again, no hesitation in his limbs as his body launched back into the maw of the building. He fired webs into the fractured walls, pulling with violent precision until chunks of debris tore free, forcing new paths into spaces that weren’t meant to be breached. The sound of collapsing concrete echoed around him, but he didn’t care; he would rip the building apart brick by brick, tear it open with his bare hands if he had to, until he found her—or at least until he proved to himself she hadn’t been swallowed whole by this ruin that seemed intent on burying every secret with it.
And indeed, he found a breach in the floor, but not at all the kind of underground parking lot or maintenance tunnel he had half-expected, not even something that bore the faintest resemblance to a service space; instead, it looked hidden, almost deliberately erased from the original design, a hollow carved into the belly of the building with no stairs, no ladder, no human path leading into it, only the jagged crack yawning wide in the debris, guilty and raw like the mouth of a grave that had been dug in secret and left open for whoever was reckless enough to fall through. Nat didn’t linger on the thought and so he let gravity drag him down into the splinters of the underground, body twisting with the grace of someone who had learned to fall without breaking.
The moment his feet struck the uneven floor, his spider-sense screamed so violently it was almost a physical shove, a razor-sharp thrum beneath his skin that left no room for hesitation, and he threw his head and shoulders to the side in a single desperate motion, his body slamming hard against the cold wall just as something cut through the air with deadly precision.
A bullet. Close enough to taste the metallic tang in the back of his throat as it bit into concrete inches from his skull, spraying dust across his mask.
“Hey, fuck you, dude,” he snapped, his voice low, eyes narrowing on the weird-ass figure that had stepped out of the shadows, rifle raised and posture tense, every line of him screaming trained soldier rather than some random survivor with a gun.
The man pressed his gloved fingers to the side of his helmet, his words echoing against the concrete with clipped urgency, “Fucking hurry—just smash all the last damn computers!”
Nat’s brow furrowed beneath the mask, his head tilting as confusion bled into irritation, and he muttered, half to himself and half to the soldier, “What the fuck is going on down here?” before shooting a web that smacked into the man’s face with a wet thwip.
The soldier panicked, firing blind, bullets veering wildly in awkward arcs, ricocheting and chewing into the ceiling, plaster and sparks raining down in thin streams of debris, while Nat moved fast, fluid, his muscles tightening and releasing like coiled springs. He webbed the man’s feet before he could recover, yanked him forward with one sharp pull, and then leapt, momentum carrying him high before slamming the guy upward, tossing him back toward the ruined ground floor like discarded trash.
For a moment, silence filled the space, a silence that felt heavier because of how much sound had roared above just minutes ago. Nat turned slowly, scanning the gloom with sharp, restless eyes, the hairs on his arms prickling because even without the spider-sense screaming at him anymore, something about this place felt wrong, like walking into a house that still smelled faintly of smoke long after the fire had been put out.
There was no pink streak of Lottie’s suit, no smart-ass crackle of her voice through the comms. And there were no signs of his other kind of ‘friends’ who might have been here either. Maybe he was too late to crash their little operation, maybe they had already cleared out and vanished with whatever they’d come here to do.
He sighed, the sound heavy in his mask, and moved forward, each step echoing faintly against the floor. The space was less damaged than the chaos above, almost eerily preserved, but it was hollowed out in another way: empty chairs pushed back from empty desks, rows of monitors black and lifeless, their screens smeared with soot, while scraps of paper littered the ground in uneven drifts. He crouched and picked one up, but the edges were charred, ink running, words erased by heat in a way that didn’t look accidental. Not burned by the tower’s fire, no, this had been deliberate, a hurried erasure, someone making sure no trace of what had happened here remained. And that realization tightened something low in his stomach, because if they had worked so hard to hide it, then whatever had been happening here wasn’t just dangerous—it was something they weren’t supposed to see at all.
He pushed himself back to his feet, lungs still burning from dust and smoke, and forced his body into motion, jogging down the cavernous hallways that stretched endlessly ahead of him, the kind of sterile underground corridors that seemed designed to make a man feel small and disoriented, his footsteps echoing too loudly against walls that had seen far too many secrets. The air felt heavy, metallic, filled with the lingering stench of burned wires and scorched concrete, and with every corner he turned, every empty laboratory or gutted office he passed, the silence pressed in harder, until the only thing reminding him the place hadn’t been abandoned for centuries was the subtle, rhythmic tremor that began to shiver beneath his feet.
He slowed for half a second, mind racing to attach reason to sensation, but before he could even finish the thought, before instinct could push him faster—there came a crash, sharp and thunderous, rolling through the hallway like a cannonball fired underground, rattling loose debris from the ceiling above. And then another crash followed, louder, closer, the walls quaking as though the whole place was about to cave in, until out of the haze of plaster dust and falling fragments, a silhouette tore itself into being, enormous and violent, smashing one wall aside and then another, ripping through the passage like it had been built for nothing more than destruction. For a fleeting instant, in the wake of its rampage, Nat caught the flash of something bright, something achingly familiar—pink streaking through the rubble.
“Lot—” he shouted, voice breaking more with urgency than volume, and without hesitation he was sprinting, chasing the chaos into its lair, until it spilled him into what looked like an office long since abandoned, its floor slick with dust and wires dangling like veins from the ceiling.
“You’re finally here,” Lottie snapped when she saw him, the strain in her voice undercut by the sharpness of her movements as she twisted just out of reach of a metal arm that whistled past her head with enough force to shatter a wall. “I could really use some help.”
Only then did Nat truly see what she was fighting—something that might once have been described as a man if you stripped away the nightmare of it, a hulking figure easily over seven feet tall, its frame plated in heavy steel that caught the flicker of failing lights, its proportions disturbingly wrong, arms almost grotesquely long, hands ending in fists that could probably tear through concrete like paper. Its face was nothing human, hidden behind an armored mask, a single red visor burning through the dust like the eye of a predator. Every movement was deliberate, brutal, efficient, and as Nat watched it swing again, tearing into the wall as though the office were made of cardboard, he realized this wasn’t just something that looked like a threat—it was a weapon, designed with only one purpose in mind, and that purpose was currently trying to pound Lottie into the ground.
“S’rry, I didn’t even know there was anything underground,” he muttered, firing webs that clung and slid uselessly across the immense, cold, metallic bulk, sparks flickering faintly where the strands scraped against the armor, and the echo of his own words bouncing off the walls made the space feel even larger and emptier than it already was.
The metal man finally seemed to register the presence of a second spider and, with a terrifying groan of hydraulics and grinding metal, swung one enormous fist toward him with the kind of force that could have splintered bone and steel alike, forcing Nat to contort his body midair and spring toward the ceiling, clinging to the cold, concrete-over-metal surface in a desperate, breathless dodge as the floor shook beneath the impact.
“Me neither—fell into it by accident. They were destroying everything, something shady was definitely going on down here,” Lottie panted, her words coming out ragged as she vaulted from overturned desks and shattered consoles, lashing strands of web with precise arcs that struck metal and machinery, some snapping off uselessly, others sticking and constricting, one finally smearing across the creature’s red visor and making it stagger back with a guttural, animalistic groan that reverberated through the cavernous room like a warning horn.
Nat seized the opening without hesitation, propelling himself with a violent, spinning leap to wrap his arms around the creature’s thick neck, feeling the unyielding weight of steel under his hands, the vibrations of servos and pistons crawling through his fingers as he grunted, shoving uselessly against the helmet. “Man, why are you hiding under such a fucking—hard-ass helmet? Are you that ugly?”
The giant grunted, muscles, or whatever passed for muscles under that metal shell, contracting with a force that hurled Nat across the room like a ragdoll, slamming him against the wall with a deafening crack that made his teeth rattle and the air whoosh painfully from his lungs, leaving him sprawled and gasping for a moment as dust and sparks fell around him like brittle rain.
“I already tried that—gonna need to find another weak point!” Lottie called from across the office, voice tight with strain, as she vaulted from desk to console, spinning webs that stuck and rattled across the armored torso of the massive machine, her movements fast, fluid, and relentless.
“Got a plan?” Nat rasped, flipping himself upright in a dizzying twist just in time to narrowly avoid another piston-like punch that slammed into the floor where he’d been standing moments before, sending shards of concrete and sparks flying in every direction.
“How about I web up our new friend, and you— you chat him up? Looks like he has sooo much to say,” she said, sending a web to his leg, and as she stayed attached to him, she began to run in a circle around him, her movements precise and fluid, the web line stretching taut and snapping with tension as the massive robot struggled to keep its balance, its metal joints groaning and sparking from the strain.
“I like that idea,” snickered Nat, his eyes darting across the towering figure, noting every mechanical shift, every microsecond of hesitation, “Hey! Look at me, big fucking doofus!” he yelled, his voice echoing against the concrete walls and scattering dust and small debris, and it seemed to work almost too easily, the red visor snapping back toward him with a whirring click, a single, mechanical acknowledgment of his presence. “Woah, I’m used to getting attention easily, but that’s a new record.”
“You’re an idiot, Spider-Man,” grunted Lottie, her tone amused even as she pivoted on her heel, keeping the web taut and forcing the robot to twist and stagger, the metal beast swinging its massive arms in clumsy arcs that scraped the walls and cracked the floor beneath them, sparks flying where metal met metal, but every strike missed Nat by mere inches as he darted and spun, landing on the slick surface of the floor with catlike precision.
“I love it when you call me that,” teased Nat, until one of the robot’s fists connected with a resounding clang, sending him spinning backward across the debris-strewn floor, but he recovered quickly, rolling and springing to his feet, letting out a grunt.
“Concentrate,” warned Lottie, not without a smile hidden behind her mask, her eyes tracking the faint whirs and clicks of the robot’s internal mechanisms as she adjusted the tension in her webbing, calculating angles and anticipating the next move of the monstrous machine.
With that, she stopped her run, leaving the giant’s legs completely entangled and immobilized, and as the robot tried to launch a new attack, its own momentum hurled it forward with a deafening crash that shook the floor, sending shards of glass and twisted metal flying in every direction, the echo bouncing off the far walls like the growl of a trapped beast.
Nat and Lottie braced themselves for more, expecting the grinding roar of steel and the violent sweep of its arms, but nothing else came; the massive figure lay still, inert and silent, its threat extinguished in the sudden, almost eerie quiet that settled over the room like smoke.
“Fuck,” Nat muttered, leaping onto its back and dragging his palm across the armored plating, feeling for hidden weak points, or lingering energy that might betray some hidden danger, but instead he found a hollow gap under his hand, and when he punched into it, his fingers went straight through the empty shell, and as he withdrew, a jagged burst of electricity arced outward like a miniature lightning strike, sizzling across the cracked floor.
“Is that…” Lottie trailed off, her voice tight with disbelief, her eyes wide behind the mask as she traced the sparks with the tip of her fingers, careful not to touch them directly.
“Yeah, that shit was just a huge fucking robot—fuck,” Nat breathed, stepping back, taking in the full scope of the mechanical monstrosity, its sheer size and the precision of its design leaving a heavy weight of unease pressing in on them from all sides.
“I think—” a voice crackled simultaneously through the comms, urgent, fragmented by static but unmistakable.
“Shauna?” Lottie interrupted, her tone cutting through the confusion like a blade.
“Finally! You can hear me?” Shauna’s voice snapped sharply through the line, tense and insistent, the background buzzing faintly with interference as if the comms had been fighting against an invisible wall of energy or machinery designed to block them from hearing.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
~
“After that, I’m sleeping for, like, five days straight,” grunted Nat as he pushed open the narrow window to his new apartment, letting Lottie slip in ahead of him before shutting it quietly behind them with a soft click that barely disturbed the stale air of the small room.
“You have class tomorrow, idiot,” Lottie called out lightly, her voice carrying a teasing edge as she walked toward the tiny bathroom.
“Urggg,” Nat groaned, collapsing onto the lumpy mattress in the center of the cramped room, his body sinking into it as if trying to fold in on itself, still in costume, the spandex sticking uncomfortably to his skin.
Lottie smiled faintly to herself, a brief, almost imperceptible twitch at the corners of her mouth, and the moment she closed the bathroom door behind her, she let out a long, restrained sigh followed by a hiss, the sound sharp and bitter as she nearly tore the mask from her face, the fabric sticking to sweat and hair, and she allowed her back to slide slowly down the door until she was sprawled on the cold, unforgiving floor, fingers trembling slightly as they brushed across her skin, the sting from scraped and bruised spots flaring again, a cruel reminder of how close she’d come to real danger.
She tried to steady her breathing, feeling the familiar ache in her chest from adrenaline and exertion, remembering how she had kept her cool on the way home, weaving through the streets with practiced poise while every nerve screamed at her that something had gone wrong, that everything had been far more fragile than it seemed, but now, alone in the quiet of this small room, the tension she’d masked so easily unraveled, leaving her raw and aware.
Today had been anything but ordinary, and fuck, that robot had hit harder than anything she’d faced before, its weight and force still echoing in her bones; with Nat there, she had managed to handle it just fine, but alone? The thought of facing it without him made her stomach twist, and she shivered involuntarily despite the warm room.
Her eyes flicked to the number etched on the robot’s back, a stark, mechanical marker that felt like a brand of warning seared into her mind, igniting every paranoid thought she tried to suppress, and the one she hated most—that it might be a serial number, evidence of more of those monstrous metal beings waiting somewhere in the dark, ready to strike with the same brutal precision—made her chest tighten and her fingers curl involuntarily into fists.
She tried to stagger back to her feet, legs trembling, nearly toppling onto the floor before her hand caught the cold, hard edge of the sink, sending a few bottles and scattered items clattering to the tile with sharp, hollow sounds that echoed in the tiny room and she pressed her palm to the cool porcelain, steadying herself while a thin haze of sweat traced down her spine.
“You good in there?” Nat’s voice called from the bed, teasing but concerned, carrying through the small space, and for a brief moment it grounded her.
“Shit,” she muttered under her breath, wincing as she pressed her fingers to her forehead, tasting the metallic tang of dried blood, “yeah,” she said finally, forcing the word out and sending it back through the thin walls separating them, before her eyes darted to the mirror and caught her reflection, and the stubborn streak of crimson smeared across her forehead refused to fade like her usual spider-healing would allow, a vivid, almost defiant mark of the violence burning bright against her skin.
She doesn’t like that—she doesn’t like being sent into that kind of state, getting bruised that badly, feeling weak in a way that gnaws at the edges of her confidence, makes her bones ache with more than just the physical pain, and reminds her that even her spider-strength and reflexes can’t always shield her from everything, that sometimes she is just fragile, just a human caught in a machine of violence she barely understands, in a foreign world where every corner, every shadow, every distant echo could hide a threat she doesn’t recognize, and she doesn’t know this place, doesn’t know its ailments, doesn’t know what she needs to do or what she has to do, what to fight, who to fight, or even how to find her way back without getting torn apart in the process.
She doesn’t like it—feeling weak, feeling fear coil around her chest like a tightening rope, feeling pain that seeps into her muscles and makes her skin crawl and her thoughts scatter.
Because it always ends up being just her, alone with her own trembling hands and her awful, clumsy attempts at patching herself up, fumbling through supplies with her mask half-off, hair plastered to her forehead with sweat and blood, muttering curses under her breath that sound hollow even to her own ears as she presses the wetted pad to her face with shaking fingers, only to have the alcohol burn like acid, run down the slope of her cheek, and sting her eyes until she wants to scream, until she collapses onto the cold, hard floor, the tiles biting through the thin fabric of her suit, and rubs at the sting in frantic, helpless circles.
“Fuck,” she cries out louder this time, the sound echoing off the walls of the tiny apartment, mingling with the sharp taste of iron in her mouth and the pounding of her pulse in her temples, and she lets herself slide back into the floor, curling a little tighter around her knees as if that could somehow hold the world at bay.
“Uh, Lot, something wrong? Do you need help?” The hesitant voice of the other Spider comes through the door, careful, uncertain, knocking softly but firmly, and Lottie freezes, the sound both comforting and unbearable, making her feel even more exposed and small.
She thinks about it, her chest rising and falling in uneven gasps, but doesn’t respond, because speaking would break something fragile inside her, would draw attention to how completely wrecked she feels, and she isn’t ready to admit it yet, not to anyone.
With only silence as her answer, Nat presses again, the words tentative but edged with concern: “I’m starting to worry. I’m gonna open the door, okay?”
She sniffs, her nose burning, her vision still blurred, and stays pressed to the floor, hugging her knees tightly, feeling the weight of her exhaustion and pain like a tangible presence, staring at the tiles beneath her.
The door opens, just as he said, and the silence stretches longer, heavy and suffocating, pressing against her chest until it feels like she might crack under it, and she can’t bring herself to look back; she knows she looks like a mess, though she already feels like one in every tremor of her body, every sting of her burned skin, every thought that reminds her she was almost crushed, and somehow still here.
“Hey.” She heard it before she saw it—Nat crouching down in front of her, the soft scrape of his knees against the floor echoing faintly in the small apartment, his hands reaching for her face, lifting her chin with two fingers, another brushing gently across her forehead, as if trying not just to wipe away the blood, but to erase the ache, the tension, the weight that had settled in her bones without permission.
Nat’s irises held something strange, something she had never seen before, a softness that made her chest tighten in a way that wasn’t painful but wasn’t exactly comfortable either, as if the warmth radiating from his gaze could somehow fill the hollows of exhaustion she hadn’t even realized she’d carried for hours, and he wasn’t looking at her like she was broken, like she was someone to rescue, someone trembling and fragile; even if she probably was all of that, right here, right now, her body aching, her nerves frayed, her mind still running loops of the fight, the robot, the chaos.
It was indescribable; Lottie couldn’t find a word for the way he looked at her, couldn’t decide if it was tenderness or quiet awe, patience or something fiercer, but he looked. Really looked. And in that look, she felt seen, not as a threat or a victim, but as someone real, someone present, someone worth noticing beyond the scratches, the blood, the exhaustion.
“How about I’ll do that,” he whispered, his voice low, threaded with both certainty and care, taking the bottle of alcohol from her hand before she could protest, unaware—or perhaps unconcerned—that she was still clutching it, his other hand brushing lightly against hers as he murmured, “Let’s get you somewhere more comfortable, okay?” squeezing her hand gently, grounding her in a way that made the floor beneath her feel slightly less unstable.
Lottie didn’t know when she had taken his hand, only that she did, that it had felt natural, that the warmth of his palm seeping into hers was the first moment of relief she had let herself feel in what felt like days, and she hadn’t said anything—just sniffed, gasped, and let the shaky exhale escape her lips—and maybe Nat wasn’t really asking anyway, because he simply guided her to the bed, steadying her as she sat at the edge, her legs swinging slightly like a pendulum, while he carefully cleaned her face with cotton pads soaked in alcohol, each stroke brushing stray hair away from the cuts with a delicate precision that made her stomach twist and her heart soften at the same time.
She might have looked like a complete wreck—eyes bloodshot, crimson streaks marring the skin across her forehead and cheeks, a deep, ugly scar like a claim left by the fight—but here, now, it didn’t matter, not in the slightest, because the world outside, with all its chaos and noise, seemed distant, irrelevant, muted by the focus in his hands, the attention in his eyes, the quiet patience in the way he leaned in closer without overwhelming her, without forcing her to meet his gaze.
“The scar is badass,” he hummed, breaking the silence just enough to make her lift her eyes slightly, and then, rifling through the small first-aid kit he had thoughtfully brought along, he pulled out a Hello Kitty bandage, holding it up like a small joke, a gentle tease in the middle of everything that had gone wrong, “How about this one?” he asked, smiling softly, the corner of his lips twitching as if the world could be lighter, even for a moment.
Lottie could only laugh—a low, soaked laugh that started in her chest and caught in her throat, uneven and fragile, but a laugh nonetheless, letting out a sound she hadn’t realized she was holding in. “Why do you have that?” she asked, her voice rough but still amused, the edges of humor cutting through the pain just enough to make her feel human again.
“Because it’s sick,” he snickered, leaning closer to press it against her skin, the warmth of his fingers lingering for a heartbeat longer than necessary, and for the first time in what felt like forever, the sharp edges of pain—from outside, from inside—blurred and softened, numbed by the presence of someone who cared, someone who didn’t flinch at the brokenness, someone who simply was there.
Somehow, against all odds, not everything in this universe felt wrong in that moment.
It was strange to be vulnerable in front of someone, to let the mask slip, to let the ache and the exhaustion show in every little flinch and shiver, but this wasn’t just anyone—it was another Spider. Another Spider who had fought alongside her, who had risked himself without hesitation, who had seen her at her worst and still stayed. Maybe that was the difference, or maybe it was something more, something deeper, something Lottie didn’t have a word for yet, but felt in her chest, heavy and impossible to ignore.
“I want to be the little spoon tonight,” she whispered.
Nat shook his head as he looked down with a smile. “You’re right—fuck my sofa anyway,” he teased, because ever since she had arrived in his life, he hadn’t gotten to sleep alone again, Lottie always finding a way to bend things to her will, and her will, for some reason, was to end up in Nat’s arms. Every. Single. Night.